'Dawood Ibrahim behind extortion messages to BJP legislatures'
LUCKNOW: Gangster Ali Budesh has alleged that the underworld don Dawood Ibrahim was sending extortion messages to BJP legislatures in his name.
During a telephonic interview with a TV channel, Budesh had claimed threats to BJP MLA's on their whatsapp has been orchestrated by Dawood, through latter's trusted aide Choota Shakeel, sources on Friday said.
Budesh, who is said to be operating a separate gang from Bahrain after parting ways with Dawood, claimed over phone that he was aware someone using his name to make extortion call to legislatures in UP, Mumbai, Delhi etc. He said that the move was made by Dawood just to defame him.
The sender made the extortion and threatening messages in Budesh's name and the message were forwarded from a landline number from Texas in America, sources said.
Meanwhile the Special Investigation Team (SIT) headed by IG (STF) Amitabh Yadav in investigating the case with the help of intelligence agencies "The state police is in contact with different intelligence agencies, besides the Intelligence Bureau, and work is in progress in this regard. The case will be worked out soon," the Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police (DGP) told mediapersons in Bareilly.
"There is no need to panic. It (threat call) is not just to the state's MLAs, but also to eminent personalities elsewhere, who are not public representatives. They, too, are getting such messages," Mr Singh stated. The state police has issued an advisory, asking people not to be scared.
The issue could be the handiwork of "professional hackers", who are using a proxy server to create panic, it said. Over 22 state legislators, most of them from the ruling BJP, have got texts or WhatsApp messages, asking them to pay Rs 10 lakh or their families will be eliminated.
The MLAs who got the messages include Veer Vikram Singh (Meeranpur Katra in Shahjahanpur), Manvendra Singh (Dadraul in Shahjahanpur), Prem Prakash Pandey (Tarabganj in Gonda), Vinay Kumar Dwivedi (Mehnam in Gonda), Vinod Katiyar (Bhognipur in Kanpur), Shahshank Trivedi (Mahauli in Sitapur) and Anita Rajput (Debai in Bulandshahr), Dhirendra Bahadur Singh (Sareni-Raebareli).